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Guitar Mic
Nappuccino
Surveyor of Things and StuffRegistered User regular
Surveyor of Things and StuffRegistered User regular
Hello H/A, I'm back with another music centric question.
I'm looking to get a decent recording set up going: something semi-professional. My main focus at this moment is on that can record acoustic guitar/vox and electric guitar with maybe a little bit of saxophone thrown in. That said, I'd like a set up that allows me to be somewhat flexible for the future.
I've read a little bit about mics but not enough to know what I need for what I would like to do and what kind of price range I'm looking at for the whole kit. I am a rather poor college student so if there are any cheap but still high quality recommendations I'd love to hear them.
As a small note, I'm not sure if this matters, but one of the main aspects to the sound I'd like to get from the mic set up is warm. The mics don't need to have a clinical accuracy of sound if they are close enough a little EQ adjustment is all that they need and they have a warm tone to them..
I'm looking to get a decent recording set up going: something semi-professional. My main focus at this moment is on that can record acoustic guitar/vox and electric guitar with maybe a little bit of saxophone thrown in. That said, I'd like a set up that allows me to be somewhat flexible for the future.
I've read a little bit about mics but not enough to know what I need for what I would like to do and what kind of price range I'm looking at for the whole kit. I am a rather poor college student so if there are any cheap but still high quality recommendations I'd love to hear them.
As a small note, I'm not sure if this matters, but one of the main aspects to the sound I'd like to get from the mic set up is warm. The mics don't need to have a clinical accuracy of sound if they are close enough a little EQ adjustment is all that they need and they have a warm tone to them..
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hitting hot metal with hammers
Agree'd, Shure makes a solid mic.
Is there any chance you could give me some general aspects of the mic from a users' perspective?
Also, my current mic is a USB mic. If my understanding is right, I'll need some extra stuff before recording with a more traditional mic, right?
Is there a place where you can rent a mic from? It shouldn't cost much if it's just for one day, and it'd give you a good feel for each one, letting you pick the best one for you. Also the technicians there will point you towards good choices.
The SM57 is the industry standard for snare drums and electric guitars. However, it is an incredibly versatile mic. FYI: It is almost identical to the SM58 which is pretty much the industry standard for live vocals.
I believe both Lenny Kravitz and Aerosmith have recorded entire albums using only SM57s.
So, the 57 is a good bet.
However, you should also be looking into some condenser mics. Honestly, I'm not familiar with enough condensers in your price range, but there are a lot of good ones for under $300 on the market these days.
The advantage of a condenser microphone is that it will pick up a wider range of frequencies and softer volume levels more accurately. It's certainly nice to have for acoustic guitar and vocal applications, and will probably sound nicer on your sax. However, condenser mics aren't nearly as common on electric guitars.
With an SM57 and a good wide-diaphragm condenser, you'll be good to go for recording pretty much anything. If you have to pick one or the other, then it should depend entirely on what you plan to record more of.
I guess I'll keep this open awhile longer because, now that a condenser mic seems like the best option for what I'm doing now, I'd love to get a few suggestions for one.
Really, think any condenser for recording, with AKG being gods for low-end.
going by what I've read so far, the Rode NT1A seems to be right up my alley but I'll check out the AKG perception as well. The price tag seems friendlier though I'm a tad worried that, due to the price tag, it could be something I end up wishing I paid the extra 100 or so for.
I'll keep reading reviews; thanks for the suggestions and keep them coming if you have anymore.
If you're looking to get a pro sound? You'll need to spend like crazy. Really, if you want better sound, you need to spend money for it. If you're just looking to record in general, any condenser.
This is, of course, all INCLUDING the microphone you invariably need to get.
I can recommend the Rode M3 if you're after a versatile, affordable and value-for-money condenser mic, but the NT1A is definitely a good choice, too.
Down here in Australia they're pretty cheap, because they're literally manufactured in the middle of Sydney and so pretty much half the people I speak to in audio/music stores recommend them over Shure, not only because of the price (which is a bonus), but because they are quality mics.
I've been using the Audiogram 6 at home in conjunction with my Rode M3. After getting it plugged into my laptop and updating to the latest audio drivers off the Yamaha website, it's been working a treat.
Disagree! Condenser mics are great for lots of live applications. Woodwinds and drum overheads, for example.
In regards to how much you're going to have to spend, the relative sound quality you're going to get, and whether it's worth it in the long run to end up spending a few hundred dollars more, I'll try to give you some food for thought.
Spoilered for length.
It's important to always remember that in terms of producing a good recording, you're going to be at the mercy of your weakest link. You can have great mics and a huge protools rig, but if you're listening to your music through laptop speakers then your recordings will still turn out like shit. Right now your biggest liability is likely to be nothing less than your own engineering skill. So I would posit that it's not necessarily a terrible idea to spend less right now on some cheaper gear and as you learn the craft you will develop a better idea of what it is you want your gear to do for you, and you will become a smarter buyer.
Here's the thing about recording gear though. A $150 mic might sound ok. A lot of them sound pretty good, actually! A $300 mic is probably going to sound noticeably better. A $1000 mic is going to sound very nice, and a $10,000 mic is going to sound just a tiny bit better. And you're still going to want to buy it. Point being, you're going to have to accept that you'll always be wanting a better mic (speaker, cable, preamp, DI, softsynth, etc), and there's nothing wrong with not buying the best mic, or even the best bang for your buck, if it doesn't fall within a reasonable budget. After all, you're not trying to build a professional studio (yet!).
That also goes hand in hand with what I mentioned earlier about always being at the mercy of your weakest link. Why would you buy a $300 microphone if you're going to be inputting it into a shitty preamp that's going to kill your sound anyway?
Without question though, there are definitely good and bad things to spend your limited budget on. The good is anything that converts sound from one medium to another. Microphones, preamps, soundcards, speakers. These are good things to spend your money on because they are the most integral parts of your sound chain, and they will never lose their value. A good mic in the 1970s is pretty much still a good mic today. The technology hasn't really changed!
Anything else is probably not worth spending your money on right now. You don't need to buy Protools or Cubase or any major recording software. Go with a free one, or heck, garageband, if you're on a mac. You don't really need a windscreen for recording vocals (it's nice to have though!). You don't need rack units and effects. You don't need baffles, bass traps, or acoustic panels for your recording room.
Finally, here's an idea. If you're just planning on recording some basic stuff now, with whatever budget you have now, and that's it, then you're probably right in your assessment that a condenser mic suits your applications. However, if you want to start building a little studio and plan on adding to it in the future, I would urge you to reconsider the SM57. Why? Because at $150 it's still the industry leader in dynamic mics. If you buy a $150 condenser I guarantee that before long you'll be wanting to buy a better one, and on top of that you'll still be wanting a 57 for your electric guitar applications.
So, if you're thinking long term, $150 on an SM57 now, and $300+ on a wide diaphragm condenser later on will get you a pretty awesome pair of all-purpose mics. It might be worth it to sacrifice a tiny bit of sound quality on your acoustic guitar right now for some savings down the road.
Everything said above is relevant, and you should at least read it twice. What I'll add is that it's far better to get started down the path of actually recording, rather than buying only half of what you need and spending more on it.
I have 3 mics, an SM57, an AKG Perception 200, and a ribbon mic. All different kinds of mics, and they all are good at slightly different things. I can't record a single instrument using stereo mics, which a lot of acoustic guitarists like to do, but I can record an instrument mic and a "room mic," for natural reverb.
Because of this setup, I find myself able to record most anything I want reasonably well. You also need mic inputs and/or preamps to plug your mics into, and you'll need a mixer to record more than 1 thing at once. Many mixers come with preamps that are fine to start with.
But it's most important to budget enough so you can buy everything you need to record. Mic stands, cables, and adapters if needed to get the sound into your computer (or whatever you're recording into). Because if you can't record, you're just going to keep looking to buy things without really exploring what you can do with the stuff you own. If you don't get into actually recording, you'll assume that the stuff you're buying is crappy and that the next step up will make everything better. Unfortunately, recording is only partly equipment -- it's largely about mic placement, doing takes, and then mixing.
My final, and probably most important recommendation, is to get a subscription to TapeOp: http://www.tapeop.com/ It's free, and just reading it will prove illuminating in ways you likely haven't anticipated.
Also where did this "condensers are the best for everything" idea come from? A bunch of my musician friends seem to believe this.
Also "condensers aren't good for live".
Condensers are good for home recording because they're sensitive, mostly. People like plugging in a mic, not having to do a lot of experimentation with placement, and picking up natural reverb with the mic. A lot of people mistake natural room reverb with warmth, so they perceive them to be warmer with less work.
A dynamic mic, or even a condenser with a cardioid or hypercardioid, are therefore perceived as being less useful precisely because their use is more specific. They excel at those specific things, but because of the increase in complexity they're seen as inferior to an omni condenser mic.
For a lot of indie recording the extra noise and accidental sounds picked up by a condenser aren't usually perceived as being problematic, so that's probably why a lot of your muso friends are fans of the things. Especially if they don't play live -- the volumes typically used for recording are significantly quieter among amateurs compared to live performances.
Don't spend a large amount of money on pre-amps. Get whatever multi-track recording device fits your budget, I use a TASCAM model that's made me very happy and was better priced than its M-Audio counterparts, but there's nothing wrong with M-Audio and Presonus is also a safe bet. 8 inputs/pre-amps will suffice if you're doing one instrument at a time, but 1 or 2 will be fine if you're never ever going to record drums. For software I got a free copy of Cubase LE from TASCAM that's stood up very well to what I'm doing with it.
Experiment thoroughly with moving the mic different distances from the sound source, try to insulate the recording area as best you can, and honestly it's not rocket science. Brains, experimentation and the right gear (which frequently is NOT the most expensive gear) will give you a recording that no lay person is going to distinguish based on its tracking from a professional one. Mixing and mastering are where you'll probably fuck things up and make it sound crappy, but if you can do decent tracking (and anyone with patience and brains can), you can pay a very reasonable fee to get those tasks done by someone with experience doing so.
Remember, most of the people who are ever going to listen to your recording are either going to do so on an MP3 player (which will kill your dynamics and distort the highs during the conversion), or in a car (where the road noise alone makes it impossible to really have an opinion about whether your mids are a touch muddy or not), or worst of all, on MySpace (low quality MP3 conversion) through shitty little $15 desktop speakers (with no bass, flat mids and tinny highs).
So just make sure your initial recordings are distortion free and clear across the range of notes that the source is performing, without noticeable reverb from the room. Hire someone with experience to do your mastering, or even your mixing if you're not sure you can get it right.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
I thought it was all about frequency response. I thought that the condensers were not just more sensitive, but more sensitive at high frequencies making them a better choice for things like cymbals/piccolos/etc, whereas the ribbon mics are more suited to low frequency sound. It's been a while, though.
I also recall that the dynamic moving-coil mics were more durable (with ribbon being the most fragile), but I'm not sure.
I have no idea if OP has any idea about microphone placement, but an SM57 would have no issues "picking up delicate finger-picking".
As much as I would kill to have access to an array of Neumann microphones, micing and mixing technique will get you a lot farther in the professional recording process than a dope microphone.
All in all, I would recommend getting two SM57's. You logically would only need one for electric and sax, but I always mic my acoustic above the soundhole and around the center of the fretboard.
What EggyToast is saying isn't *quite* correct. When selecting a mic, besides choosing the type of microphone (condenser, dynamic, ribbon), there is also the polar pattern to be concerned about. The polar pattern is technically irrelevant to the mic type for the most part. The polar pattern is the directionality of sound that a microphone picks up. They fall in a few general patters- Omnidirectional (picks up sound equally in all directions), Figure-8 (picks up in a bubble on two sides of the mic, but picks up hardly anything between them), and Cardioid (picks up in a roughly heart-shaped pattern in front of the mic). There are also super- and hyper- cardioid patterns, but those are just tightened-up cardioid patters with a little bit of pickup on the other side.
Omni mics are usually used to pick up all the sound in a room equally- this picks up all the ambiance of the room, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on how noisy your environment is, and how reflective the surfaces of the room are. Since you're recording at home, you *probably* won't have the best recording environment, full of noise and parallel surfaces creating standing waves. Unless you absolutely love the sound of the room, I'd stay away from omni mics for the most part.
Figure-8 mics are a bit specialized, you won't want one.
Cardioid are possibly the most common polar pattern, and are probably what you want. They have pretty good noise rejection from the sides of the microphone, mostly picking up the stuff you really want to hear, your guitar. If you really want the big ambiance... well, computer effects are usually pretty decent at simulating a bigger sound.
NOW- The difference between dynamic and condenser mics. I'll spare you the really technical details, suffice it to say that dynamic mics use magnetic moving coils to generate the mic signal (basically the opposite of the way a speaker works), while condenser mics use plates forming a capacitor to generate a signal. The end effect, though, is what's important.
Dynamic mics are usually less expensive, more durable, and are capable of handling louder sounds without distorting. However, the higher mass of the moving coil is slower to respond to changes in sound vibrations, resulting in a slightly slower response, giving a less accurate capture. They also are less sensitive in the spectrum of frequency they respond to.
Condenser mics, on the other hand, are generally more expensive, less durable, and can't handle as loud of volumes. The tradeoff, though, and the reason they are generally preferred in studios for almost everything except drums, is that they are more accurate in their response, having much less mass to move to respond to sound.
Ribbon mics are actually special dynamic mics (not moving coil) that use a super-thin sheet of metal. They are very accurate, but they are also very fragile and very expensive. You won't even want to consider one of these.
This is all probably a lot more information than you need to know. Like Pheezer said, mic placement is extremely important. At this point, I'd recommend you get a cardioid condenser microphone, this will serve you quite well for both guitar and saxophone. Unfortunately, I don't really have a recommendation for a specific one.
If you think the reverb/background noise you're pulling sounds good based on one track, you're probably wrong. When you combine three to five tracks worth of background noise it gets fucking loud fast. You want to isolate the recordings as best as possible, and if you love how your environment sounds, get a recording on a separate track with an omni mic and then you'll be able to control their levels independently and make sure things aren't a noisy mess.
Also when considering external recording units, look only at the # of pre-amps it provides. That's the numbe of mics you can connect. I have a "16" track recorder but it only has 8 pre-amps, has 2 high impedance inputs (you can connect an electric guitar directly in), and 4 line level inputs, which are only good if you're using an amplifier and a DI box and you don't need em unless you know you do. But, I only need 7 mics for my drums and one for the guitar and my bass amp has a line out which I use with one of the line ins.
I guess there are a few things I'm curious about, like how are you recording? All at once or track at a time? How are you getting the sound from the mic to the computer? Where are you recording? How do you want the finished product to sound?
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Garrod: I definately agree. While semi-professional type studio would be really nice to have, in general the things I really want to have are 1-2 good mics, a pretty good pre-amp and, I suppose, something that allows for up to four mics to record at once (assuming there isn't a huge price difference from 2 mics to 4)
As far as speakers/headphones go, I have a fairly nice set of speakers and a good set of sennheisers so I believe I'm covered on that end.
And I'll definately keep the SM57 in mind for the first mic.
@Pheezer: That is a good point you make, about knowing how to use the equipment is better than having the best equipment itself. I'm definately not looking to by "The best" but if the difference is pretty highly quantifiable from $150 to $300 then that is something I can probably afford to pay for. If the difference isn't that extreme then I would probably stick around the 100-150 range. And, while I understand the point about most people who will listen to the music will listen to a compressed mp3 or in the car, the quality of the initial product is more for me than anyone else. Regardless if anyone else even listens to my music I want it to sound the best it can
Also, I'm currently recording with a USB Blue Snowball which, though it seemed like a good idea at the time, has been making me regret the choice more and more as the recent months have gone on. Since it's tied to a USB cable I can't record anywhere other than right in front of my desk. Since I'm the only one involved with the recording, I am only recording one track at a time. However, since I only have the one mic, I'm unable to get the ambiance of the room, just the "noise" the mic picks up on its own.
Overall, I'm looking to do something similar in tone to Iron and Wine's and Owen albums; a mix of quiet acoustic guitars, melodic (and possibly distorted) electric guitars. Things like that. I can certainly post links to music for a general mix of what I'd like to be able to record.
@Metahost: I was just going off of the general reviews that I had read for the SM57's. They seemed to suggest that they were not the best microphones for recording acoustic guitar music.
@ProXimity: If what you're saying is true, you've mostly added to my decision to go for a condenser mic.